Twitter started out life as an AIM hack that Jack Dorsey added to his pager, Wired reports. Dorsey had been quite involved in the world of instant messaging, and had launched a dispatch software startup in 1999. Dorsey became quite interested in his friends’ status messages and wanted to see them and set his own …
Category: Social Stream
👓 The Lost Origin of Twitter | WIRED
Before Twitter was public, it was just an AIM hack on Jack Dorsey’s pager. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had a background in messenger culture. He had even launched a dispatch software startup called D-Net, back in 1999. He was also captivated by his friends status messages on AOL Instant Messenger. He wanted to combine the \[…\]
👓 twttr sketch | Flickr
On May 31st, 2000, I signed up with a new service called LiveJournal. I was user 4,136 which entitled me a permanent account and street cred in some alternate geeky universe which I have not yet visited. I was living in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland California and starting a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web. One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more "live" LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand. The 6th year; the idea has finally solidified (thanks to the massively creative environment my employer Odeo provides) and taken a novel form. We're calling it twttr (though this original rendering calls it stat.us; I love the word.ed domains, e.g. gu.st/). It's evolved a lot in the past few months. From an excited discussion and persuasion on the South Park playground to a recently approved application for a SMS shortcode. I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives. Some things are worth the wait.
👓 Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company | Medium
I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest–before I vested any of my stock–to turn Gumroad into a billion-dollar company. And…
Juvenile fiction recommendations for Kim Hansen
There are only a few places where there are now seeming plot holes where a cell phone would have made all the difference (example: Artie Geller going missing in No Coins, Please!), but they’re generally so well told and so funny that I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief.
In A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag where energy technology figures relatively prominently, it still reads really well, particularly because we’ve still got those types of technology problems. Even the computer teacher quitting when the computers crash and don’t save work because of power issues at school reads well in a modern context. Of course, this book is set on Long Island, so it might not have the Canadian “representation” that you’re looking to recommend to them.
I’ve only made my way through a couple of the Macdonald Hall series, but those are just good clean prankster fun, so modern technology doesn’t seem to have factored in for me. While most of Korman’s work (at least that I’ve read thus far) is very male-centered, these particular books have some good female representation and depict the girls at the school across the street as very modern and on a generally equal footing with boys, particularly with the antiquated, dotty, old-school head mistress as a foil. On this front, I’d give Korman very high marks in comparison with other relatively recent juvenile literature classics like Beverly Cleary who even through the 70’s was having main characters like Henry regularly say overtly sexist things like “Beezus is pretty smart–for a girl.”
The tough part of more modern juvenile literature is that a lot of it has gone much further upstream and spread out considerably compared to what we had available in our youths. There’s a huge swath of YA work that has filled in but which borders more on soft-core Danielle Steele a la the Twilight Series. Almost all of these are also written as parts of longer series of 3, 4, 7, or more books too, which can be annoying because the plot is often strung out in choppy ways. If they’re a bit older and in high school, perhaps John Green’s work may be appropriate?
If they haven’t come across them, I always like to recommend Holes by Louis Sachar; The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg; Lois Lowry’s The Giver (et al.) which I’ve been re-reading lately too; and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. All of these are generally great timeless literature, and I often recommend them to adults who may have missed them.
I’m also a fan of the more recent Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart which has some of the rollicking fun of Korman with some interesting twists, plotting, and has some well-rounded representation of characters.
A while back I read the first in a series of steampunk/pirate books called A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis which had a lot of interesting science, alchemy, science fiction, and adventure. While it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, it was pretty well done, entertaining, and may appeal to them.
Also similar to Korman, but even older to the point that they read as period literature, they might find The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald or The Mad Scientists’ Club by Bertrand R. Brinley highly engaging. Sadly, while entertaining and with a lot of heart and cultural intelligence, they don’t have much, if any, female representation, primarily as a function of their authors and when they were written.
📖 53% done reading A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman
📺 "The Big Bang Theory" The Donation Oscillation | CBS
Directed by Mark Cendrowski. With Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg. Penny tries to throw a wrench into Leonard's plan to be a sperm donor for her ex-boyfriend; Wolowitz, Bernadette, Anu and Koothrappali turn Koothrappali's canceled bachelor party into a couple's trip aboard the "vomit comet."
📺 "The Big Bang Theory" The Meteorite Manifestation | CBS
Directed by Mark Cendrowski. With Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg. Sheldon is thrilled to help Bernadette and Howard navigate bureaucracy concerning a neighbor's non-compliant balcony until he learns they too have ignored codes. Leonard is disappointed when his friends are uninterested in his new laser.
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Perhaps we need to create a new renaissance of humanism for the 21st century? Maybe we call it digital humanism to create some intense focus, but the emphasis should be completely on the people side.
Naturally there’s a lot more that they–and we all–need to do to improve our lives. Let’s band together to create better people-centric, ethical solutions.
📺 Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature RLST 152 – Lecture 8: The Gospel of Thomas | Open Yale Courses
We have known of the existence of the Gospel of Thomas from ancient writers, but it was only after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices that the actual text became available. The Gospel of Thomas is basically a collection of sayings, or logia, that sometimes seem similar, perhaps more primitive than sayings found in the canonical Gospels. Sometimes, however, the sayings seem better explained as reflecting a “Gnostic” understanding of the world. This involves a rejection of the material world and a desire for gnosis, a secret knowledge, in order to escape the world and return to the divine being.
I just heard a snippet of a radio show recently in which the interview guest would be talking about practicing multiple faiths simultaneously could be interesting and fruitful. Obviously this is not a new ideas…